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Growing Alongside the Energy Industry: Jim McConville’s 35 years at NAES
When Jim McConville joined NAES in 1991, NAES was still finding its footing in the third-party operations and maintenance business. After completing his MBA at the University of Washington and spending six years as a nuclear test engineer at Puget Sound Naval...
Growing Alongside the Energy Industry: Jim McConville’s 35 years at NAES
When Jim McConville joined NAES in 1991, NAES was still finding its footing in the third-party operations and maintenance business. After completing his MBA at the University of Washington and spending six years as a...
Considerations for Critical Infrastructure Operators Working With Third-Party ICS Integrators
Under NERC CIP-013, entities must work with suppliers, contractors, and OEMs to establish and enforce cybersecurity and supply chain risk management requirements for the procurement and handling of BES Cyber Systems and their associated EACMS...
The Expertise Barrier Just Collapsed: AI-Written Exploits Against Plant PLCs
By Leonard Wills, NERC CIP Reliability Specialist For years the comfort in generation was that attacking a PLC took rare skill. You had to understand S7 comm or Modbus, the memory map, the engineering tooling,...
NERC Category 2 Sites: 2026 Compliance Updates and Standards Development
By Laura Christensen, Sr NERC Reliability Specialist The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has completed a major expansion of its Generator Owner (GO) and Generator Operator (GOP) registration requirements for certain inverter-based resources (IBRs)....
Colorado River: Hydropower Challenges and Western Grid Reliability
By Sam Coffey, NERC Reliability Specialist Low water levels are reducing hydroelectric generation at Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam, two of the largest hydropower facilities in the western United States. According to a 2026...
Winter Reliability Is Improving—But the Work Is Not Finished
By Joshua Brantley, Sr NERC Reliability Specialist The joint 2026 cold weather performance review from FERC, NERC, and the Regional Entities delivers an encouraging message for the electric industry: preparation is improving, and those improvements...
BES–Gas Interdependence
By Bill Henson, NERC Reliability Specialist Background As the electric industry undergoes significant changes, new challenges and opportunities arise for reliability and security. In 2023, utility-scale power plants produced 4,183 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity....
From the Field to the Boardroom: Staying Connected to Power Plant Operations
As a company grows, the people making business decisions naturally become further removed from the people carrying them out. Senior leaders may be focused on customers, budgets, staffing, and growth while field teams are managing...
FINDING THE ECONOMIC OPTIMUM IN POWER PLANT O&M
WHY THE LOWEST O&M BUDGET IS RARELY THE MOST PROFITABLE By: Robert Wolfe, Director of Asset Optimization, NAES Executive Summary. O&M budgets should be evaluated by the operating margin they enable, not by cost adherence...
